Porn prank sends Microsoft a message on licensing

One Microsoft group received a rather harsh lesson in Creative Commons licensing today: For a while this morning, Microsoft’s RSS Team Blog featured a partially censored pornographic image, which has since been removed.

How did it get there in the first place? As the note at the bottom of the post now indicates, the blog originally contained a much more wholesome image that was being drawn from former Microsoft employee Niall Kennedy’s Flickr account. But when Kennedy saw that the blog was using that image without permission, he replaced the photo in his account with another one he found online, making that unsavory image appear smack in the middle of the Microsoft RSS blog.

Kennedy explained via phone that he had offered his ordinary photo (taken at the Gnomedex conference a couple years ago) for use under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be posted on non-commercial sites, with proper attribution. (Hence the Creative Commons logo censoring out the central part of the pornographic replacement image.) He wasn’t pleased that Microsoft used his photo on a commercial site, without attribution. In addition, he said, the use of the photo violated the Flickr terms of service by not linking back to the site.

“Basically they stole one of my photos and put it on their blog,” Kennedy said. “I decided to make them very aware of that fact.”

Presumably, they are. The updated RSS Team post now concludes with an apology to Kennedy for the improper use, in addition to an apology to readers who saw the second image. What’s your opinion of what Kennedy did? Was he justified? Should be interesting to see what people think of this one.